Atlantis According to Edgar Cayce

By Andrea Campbell

For over 2,000 years, the idea of a civilization lost somewhere beneath the deep, dark sea has inspired philosophers, writers and mystics. Learn what one so-called psychic had to say about the lost city of Atlantis.

Setting the Scene

How do you picture Atlantis? Many stories have been told about the wisdom of the ancients and people have imagined everything from extraterrestrial beings in spaceships to crumbling palace cities. In the 1954 Disney movie adaptation of Verne’s science fiction adventure 2000 Leagues, Captain Nero of the “Nautilus” takes the protagonist, Professor Pierre Aronnax, on an undersea walk. They pass ruins with Greek columns and temples draped with seaweed curtains.

In his historic book The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon wrote about a society trying to balance the challenges of science and technology. For his story set on the mythical island Bensalem, Bacon describes the inhabitants as chaste and with high moral character.

Ancient philosopher and scholar Plato is supposedly the first person who placed Atlantis in the Greek world. He described it in two of his short dialogues and claimed his source was a distant relative, Solon. Solon had traveled extensively and interviewed the priests in the city Sais, in old Egypt. They both talked about a people of Atlantis and their empire as an island paradise that lay westward, beyond the Pillars of Heracles or the Straits of Gibraltar.

They said the Atlanteans started out as a godlike people with purity of heart that fell into corruption and greed. The Atlanteans invaded the Greeks but the Athenians defeated them. The gods punished the Atlanteans with earthquakes and floods so the sea swallowed both their island and the Athenian army. Could Atlantis have been the real Island of Thera in the Aegean Sea?

Ignatius Donnelly

Born in 1832, Donnelly was an eccentric American politician and writer.

The subject of Atlantis had fallen off the radar when Donnelly resuscitated it with his most popular book, Atlantis, in 1882. This volume took the mythical continent of Atlantis and traced the origin of civilization to them.

His theory was that the gods dwelt on Olympus. Donnelly says in his book, “They lived together like human beings; they possessed palaces, storehouses, stables, horses, etc. Where was Olympus? It was in Atlantis. It was a great island, the then civilized world. The encircling ocean ‘was spoken of in all the ancient legends. Okeanos lived there with his wife Tethys: these were the Islands of the Blessed, the garden of the gods, the sources of the nectar and ambrosia on which the gods lived.”

American Beliefs

A Chapman University survey of 1,500 participants from across the United States asked Americans about their fears and found that nearly 70 percent do not believe that advanced civilizations like Atlantis existed.

Speculation about where Atlantis might have been runs the gamut. It is often thought to have been part of the earth when land bridges tied all the continents together. The Bermuda Triangle is often attributed as the site of Atlantis because of strange phenomena and citings of lost ships. The Canary Islands have peaks that are surmised to be as Atlantis’ tallest mountains as well.

Edgar Cayce and Atlantis

Edgar Cayce (KAY-Cee) was born on a farm in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1877. He died in 1945, just around the time World War II was winding down. Referred to as the “sleeping prophet,” Cayce was the most recognizable psychic in the 20th century. His alleged abilities came to him in childhood when he pronounced he could talk to spirits in another realm. Unbelievably, he could recite pages of a book after having slept on it!

Most scientists believe that Atlantis was destroyed after the Ice Age, when the mammoths died, about 12,000 years ago. They surmise that the island was either hit by an asteroid or swallowed up by a shift in earth’s crust. Edgar Cayce had Atlantis predictions that helped adventurers to rediscover the lost continent. About 20 years after his death, some of his ideas proved true. For example, Cayce said that Atlantis would “rise again” and he indicated a location, Bimini, in the Bahamas. Drivers and other pilots found evidence of vertical columns and blocks in that region. Surprisingly many of these structures appeared to be manmade. Some even resembled pyramids.

Cayce also said that the Atlantean people had a grip on technology and had been able to exploit the powers of the quantum world. He stated that they used crystals, lasers, air and steam along with metals to harness sound waves and that they used quartz crystal science to mine for gold, copper and silver. He also claimed they had gas balloons, airplanes, submarines, elevators, antigravity machines, x-ray devices and even television. He said the civilization they created was so advanced they had tapped into mass mental telepathy and psycho-kinesis, the ability to move inanimate objects.

This advanced culture caused their greed and manipulations to get the best of them. Their power plants were responsible for the destruction of the land. He revealed that the most corrupt Atlanteans were known as, “Sons of Belial” and that they had developed a crystal machine that harnessed the power of the sun but the device overloaded. He said the explosion took place around 50,000 BC, splitting Atlantis into five islands, which eventually led to the last final cataclysm.

Cayce claimed the ability to read the past lives of people, assessing their fears and trauma in “previous incarnations” to help them. He put himself into a trance-like state to be possessed by these entities from patient’s earlier lives. These utterings were taken down by amanuensis—a scribe—and interpreted. He completed over 2500 readings (some say up to 14,000) and 700 of them were purportedly for Atlantis incarnations; spirit forms.

Cayce was a devoted churchgoer and Sunday school teacher who read the Bible every year of this life. At his death, he had completed the entire text 67 times.